1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a microfluidic mixing device and, more particularly, to a microfluidic mixing device that can be used with a microfluidic chip.
2. Description of the Related Art
Due to development of micro electromechanical techniques, people in the art use micro electromechanical procedures to reduce and integrate large analyzing instruments into a microchip (which is referred to as “lab-on-a-chip”). The product is a biochip or biomedical chip having advantages including reducing the consumption of the biological reagents, saving energy, reducing costs, reducing reaction time, and increasing detection precision. In recent years, microfluidic systems have been actively applied in the biomedical and chemical fields and, thus, produce microfluidic chips for use in mixing several liquids and conducting characteristic detection.
However, in use of the above microfluidic chips, a trace syringe pump is generally used as the device for injecting and pressurizing the liquids to be mixed. Before proceeding with microfluidic mixing, a needle of the trace syringe pump is bonded to an injection port of a microfluidic chip, leading to operational inconvenience and risks of injury to the operator by the needle. Furthermore, the preprocess is time-consuming and, thus, adversely affects the liquid mixing efficiency and the subsequent detection efficiency. Furthermore, in a case that the number of sets of liquids to be mixed is large, a plurality of trace syringe pumps is required. However, the costs of trace syringe pumps are high, which causes problems to the detecting unit in obtaining a balance among the hardware costs, mixing, and detection efficiency.
Furthermore, during detection of the microfluids, if it is desired to heat or cool the test solution after mixing, an additional heating or cooling device is required. After the trace syringe pump has injected the liquids into the microfluidic chip and mixed the liquids, the microfluidic chip is moved into the heating or cooling device to proceed with heating or cooling. Thus, the liquid mixture could be affected by the environmental change while moving the microfluidic chip, and the detection result could be affected. Furthermore, the devices used in the detecting procedure are independent from each other, which not only occupy a larger space but are inconvenient to portability.